Funny to see this here. I created scirate years ago when I was in academia working in quantum computing. Back when Digg was hot. When I left that world and join

Funny to see this here. I created scirate years ago when I was in academia working in quantum computing. Back when Digg was hot. When I left that world and joined Google, I shut it down as I needed to spend all my time learning to code (true today as well I suppose). It was then rewritten by others. Twice! And relaunched using the old domain name. Many thanks to the current stewards. Amusingly it was even more useful to me after I left academia. Scirate’s community is almost entirely theoretical quantum computing, and so I was able to keep up with the field by looking every three months or so at the top papers. As noted in other comments, the end point of vanity voting isn't great. It's not great at discovery, but I have found papers there I would never have read. But because it is a small community it actually does a good job in quantifying what the community feels is important. I suspect if scirate was ever more widely used it would be less useful. Another interesting phenomenon is that no one ever precisely defined what voting meant. Some people think of it as endorsing. Others as bookmarking. Not sure what impact this has, but sometimes if you score your own paper people will growl at you.